


i was the tired face lying next to you

by girljustdied



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-08 03:03:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17378363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girljustdied/pseuds/girljustdied
Summary: you and me.  screw everyone else.  let's just go.





	i was the tired face lying next to you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mollivanders](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/gifts).



> so apparently the shooting script for “day trip” includes bellamy asking clarke to run away with him. i don’t watch this show anymore but okay.   
> prompt was "an old wound that still aches."

There is a weight. It’s physical, in her muscles, driving her bones down into the earth.

“Come with me,” he says.

Unthinkable. “What?”

“You and me. Screw everyone else.” How novel to be the focus of Bellamy’s particular brand of persuasion. How compelling. “Let’s just,” he swallows, “go.”

She rests her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes. _You don’t like me_ , she wants to remind him. _I don’t like you_. But he had just murdered Dax the same way he had watched her cut Atom’s throat. That was a fact. “You don’t mean it.”

“Don’t I?” he sighs. “Isn’t that what today was about? Getting away.”

“It’s tempting,” it doesn’t cost her anything to admit to him. “The things I’ve seen, the things I’ve done,” she can’t continue.

His gaze forward again, “Do you think Octavia will ever forgive me?”  
  
“I don’t know.” Remembers Wells. Her mother. Can still barely let herself think even fleetingly about Finn. “I’m not really someone to talk to about forgiveness.”  
  
“Aren’t you?”  
  
Oh.

“With you,” she presses her lips together and exhales through her nose before finishing the thought, “it’s surprisingly easy. Maybe because my expectations of you are so low to start with.”  
  
“Nice,” he mutters.  
  
She touches his palm with her fingertips, and his hand curls lightly at the points of contact.

Asserts, “We have to go back. They need us.”

He takes in the stray tears sliding down her cheeks with an understanding of her that he has no right to.

Eventually, they would have to go back.

They fall asleep there, leaning against that tree, too exhausted to move to a resting place less out in the open. When she wakes the next morning to find that they hadn’t been punished for it, she is grateful. The sun is high in the sky. Bellamy is digging a hole.

Pressing a palm to her aching forehead, “How long have you been awake?”

“Not long,” his words clipped. He’s covered with dirt. “It’s late. We probably won’t be able to make it back before nightfall.” He stills, waiting for an answer.

“Okay.”

Tomorrow, they’ll make the day trip back to the dropship.

For now, they bury a man.

“What size shoe are you?” she asks before.

“I’m not wearing his fucking boots, Clarke.”

And so she lets that be that. The silence that locks between them is sudden and forceful. They explore the rest of the bunker but find little else beyond a cot that might be good for one of them to sleep on. The surrounding woods are devoid of any sign of human life, and two hundred meters east they find a lake. The water is still, and clear.

Bellamy strips down to his underwear without a word; Clarke sits cross-legged on a boulder near the waterline and watches. It’s highly unlikely that he’s swam before, but he’s careless entering the water and submerges his head immediately. When he breaks the surface moments later, it releases a heavy breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“Are you coming in?” he disturbs their quiet as if it was nothing at all, pushing his wet hair back from his face.

“We should probably find something to eat,” she answers after a brief, startled hesitation. Touches her hair with nervous fingertips. “Something that isn’t hallucinogenic nuts.”

“Do we have to do that right now?”

“No,” she murmurs, hunger gnawing at her belly.

He moves to float on his back, says, “Good.”

Perhaps she’d never eat again. Never wash again. Never speak again. None of it. Snaps, “This isn’t a vacation, you know.”

“Oh?” his eyes still skyward. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she stands and brushes off her pant legs. “I’m going back to the bunker. Don’t get killed.”

Along the way she picks stray berries and flowers with thick roots that might be good to eat. When she spots a small rabbit, she acts counter to her own instincts, hand on the knife on her hip as she creeps closer. Curses when her strike misses and stays kneeling in the dirt for longer than she should, bone-tired.

It’s almost dark when Bellamy clambers down the stairs, closing the hatch behind him firmly. His skin is clean and reddened from sun exposure, and the edge of his shirt is still damp.

“Are you hungry?” she asks from her seat on the cot.

He shakes his head, tugging down the sheet they’d hung for target practice, and lays it near her feet.

“You can have the bed,” she hedges, not really wanting to give it up.

He snorts with derision. “Real convincing, Princess.”

“For once, I guess I deserve that.”

He laughs in a way that is clearly an expression of disagreement. It’s a tender sound.

“You don’t really hate me so much, do you? You did ask me to run away with you.”

“You’re young,” he shrugs. “Sometimes I forget.”

“I’m old enough to be floated. It’s hard to keep track of days between solitary on the Ark and life down here, but,” she crosses her arms over her chest.

The lines of his face are so quick to tense and sharpen with anger.

“Happy birthday,” he bites out.

“How old are you?”

“I was twenty when my mother was floated.” He closes his eyes and takes a breath to get himself in check. “That was two years ago.”

“I was seventeen,” she offers.

“What?”

“When my father was.”

“Look, Clarke,” he scrubs at his face with one hand. “Can we just go to sleep?”

Left unsaid: _They have an early morning tomorrow if they’re going to make it back home._

“Bellamy?” She moves to stand toe to toe with him.

He eyes her warily, “Yeah?”

“You can have the cot,” she tries for a smile, and maybe succeeds. “I mean it.”

“Fine.”

A night on the floor makes it easier to leave at daybreak without waking him. The water in the lake is frigid from lack of sunlight, but she undresses and slips under the surface anyway, shivering. Rinses her clothes out first and lays them flat on the boulder to dry, then attends to her hair, her body, the grime under her nails. Without intention, she hums snatches of an old lullaby her mother had once used to sing her to sleep with. Stops.

She imagines a rushing river in the place of the still water she’s treading, strong and wild, whisking her away. Imagines closing her eyes and letting go. Imagines the blackness of space. Stops.

Whether or not she’d expected Bellamy to be waiting for her is irrelevant. He’s there, perched atop the edge of the bunker door with one leg dangling down through the opening and the other bent up against his chest.

His greeting: “Neat trick.”

“Tomorrow,” she sighs, and means it.

He’d caught a squirrel, which they roast over a small fire lit a safe distance from their current home base to try and throw off any predators—Grounder or otherwise. The meat is greasy and singed, but it’s still meat. Better than a protein pack on the Ark, and better than nothing at all.

“How was the lake today?” he teases around a mouthful of food. “I’d forgotten how blonde you are.”

“Thanks?”

The sun had slipped below the horizon without any fanfare, she realizes. They should head back.  
  
He’s contemplative, eyes on the dwindling fire. “Makes you miss the Ark, huh?”  
  
“Sure,” Clarke sighs. Extinguishes the fire with handfuls of dirt and unloads all the old horrors with each one: “Children going blind from oxygen deprivation. My dad floated for trying to warn everyone. A life in solitary confinement for me. And my mother behind the betrayal.” She pauses, struggling to catch her breath. “The Ark was a real cakewalk for this princess.”  
  
He does not respond for a long stretch of time, seemingly loathe to have this conversation with her. Only when they are steps away from the bunker does he speak up:  
  
“I meant running water,” his tone is purposefully measured. “I know I miss it.”  
  
“Oh,” is all she can manage.  
  
“But, hey, if you really wanna argue politics and class struggles—” he trails off as he strains to close the hatch over their heads, knocking away stray twigs blocking the seal, obviously weary and not wanting it to show in his voice.  
  
“Raincheck?” she murmurs, reaching up to help with a hand gripping a handful of his jacket for balance.

“Easy for you to say.”

They finally pull the door closed together, chest to chest. She finds herself frozen there, arms still holding the handle of the door, her exhales pressing her body to his.

“It’s funny," she voices the thought before she can think not to.  
  
“What?” he’s distracted, brows furrowed and arms brushing hers as they fall to his sides.  
  
“Maybe not funny,” she amends. “More strange.”  
  
He cants his body more fully towards her to give his full attention, right knee against her left thigh, but says nothing.  
  
“I’m not really sure how to talk to you.” Then, with a forced shrug, she lets go of the hatch, “I mean, when we’re not fighting. Or—”  
  
He frowns and shakes his head—knows what’s coming:  
  
“Or when we’re not watching someone die,” she chooses the words carefully.  
  
“That’s a nice way to put it,” he grouses. “Real poetic. Blameless, too. That how you gonna explain it whenever we get back to the dropship and mission control lands?”  
  
“I’m doing the best I can, Bellamy,” the words bitter, eyes flicking down to his mouth before she closes them with a huff of frustration.

He’s tantalizingly apologetic, “Yeah.”

She waits for him to tell her that he is, too. He doesn’t.  
  
"Screw the Ark, screw everyone," she can feel the heat of Bellamy’s scrutiny as she says the words. Opens her eyes again to prove her hypothesis and there he is, staring back at her. "I wouldn't want to be anywhere but here. Now."

“You don’t mean it,” he puts a hand in her hair, the heel of his palm on her temple.

She doesn’t. But that doesn’t keep her from kissing him messily, hands moving to grip his sides underneath his coat. He cups the other side of her face with his free hand and they stumble down the stairs in stops and starts, fused together.

“This is stupid,” he growls into her mouth while he simultaneously yanks open the button and zipper of her jeans and heels off his boots.

Their lips separate with a hiss as she pulls away to tug her shirt up over her head.

“Can we worry about that later?”

“Yeah,” he laughs, pressing her back into the wall with a thigh between her legs lifting her up off the floor. “Yeah.”

Tomorrow.


End file.
